


the valiant never taste of death but once

by bookoftheazuresky



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Dead All Along, Gen, Ghosts, Heroic Sacrifice, Spoilers: Mahad dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 14:04:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9902009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookoftheazuresky/pseuds/bookoftheazuresky
Summary: You couldn’t reason with a ghost, not really, because they were too committed to what had killed them to be reasonable- if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be ghosts in the first place.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Call](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7635649) by [joisbishmyoga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joisbishmyoga/pseuds/joisbishmyoga). 



> Thief King Bakura's actions make a lot more sense if you interpret him as a vengeful ghost.
> 
> Title is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Mahad didn’t look down at the bridge, though it took an effort of will. He wouldn’t see anything anyway, his illusions were very good, and he’d decided it was worth what it would take in magic to obscure his traps, given his opponent’s skillset.

He permitted himself a small spark of satisfaction when the thief stepped forward and-

Nothing happened. Well, that wasn’t quite true, Bakura looked down and then stepped out of the illusion and the trap beneath it, leg unharmed and trap untriggered. He shot Mahad an amused look, and said, “Isn’t a priest supposed to be above cheating?”

Mahad ignored the words, and did something he should have done long before. He shut out all the various magical influences in the chamber, all the layered spells, and _looked_ at his opponent with his magical senses.

Bakura was tightly focused and well-shielded to a magician’s inner eye. The _dia dhank_ was a bright blaze against that solid control. Still, Mahad was the best magician of his generation, better than any of his predecessors. He recognized the eerie grayish corona around a bloody core, almost completely hidden under a seeming that could pass for human.

“Night-haunt,” he said, and cursed himself for not checking before. The restless dead were a bad opponent for a magician- and Mahad was, despite his title, a magic-user and not a cleric.

“Very good,” Bakura said mockingly. “It only took you a decade or so.” He stopped shielding, dropped all pretense of mortality. Soot blackened bare feet glided lightly over the bridge’s surface, barely touching. His cloak was all tatters, soaked with arterial spray and streaked with more ash. The scar on his face looked fresh, now, bled out rather than scabbed over. Underneath the blood and ash, the spirit’s skin had lost all luster of life and gone a wrecked shade of pale. “Do you know how _annoying_ it is to fake growing up when you’re dead?”

“How old were you?” Mahad asked, brain working swiftly as he reevaluated his strategy. The traps here were useless- he suspected it took active concentration for Bakura to actually affect and be effected by the physical world, and he’d just proved that surprising him would ruin that just as completely as giving him time to think. Similarly, most summoned monsters would be worse than useless because their only means of attack was physical and-

Mahad threw up a shield in between himself and the ghost, who had edged too close for comfort. Bakura stopped, then reached out to lay hands on the translucent violet of the barrier. The effect was immediate- Mahad swayed on his feet at the ugly, drugging drain. Forcing himself upright, he could see that starbursts of discoloration were spreading out from the thief’s hands, slowly but inexorably. Magic was energy, the stuff of life, and exactly what a hungry ghost consumed from its victims.

“I was seven,” Bakura informed him. He sounded very calm now, confident and confiding. “It wasn’t even the fire that killed me, or the sword. It was the smoke. You fall down and you can’t even breathe. Almost like falling asleep. Almost like _mercy_.” The last word was a hiss, a crack in the mask that proved that for how very steady the thief had been during his last appearance, all the rage and despair of the unburied dead lay just beneath the surface.

Wrong person, wrong time, wrong place. Mahad had misjudged his opponent, and he was going to die for it. You couldn’t _reason_ with a ghost, not really, because they were too committed to what had killed them to _be_ reasonable- if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be ghosts in the first place. You couldn’t kill them, they were already dead. And Mahad didn’t have any monsters that would be effective against one either, because spirits of light and life were not the kind of creatures that the Pharaoh’s court were going to pull from the soul of a criminal- or that Mahad himself had any affinity for. He could think of perhaps three that would have a chance, and they all belonged to Isis. And as Bakura was currently proving as he leaned against a wall that should have held back any number of demons, Mahad’s own magic was just going to be like pouring alcohol on a fire.

“You’re not going to summon anything?” Mahad asked, playing for time and praying for a bright idea.

Bakura tilted his head. “Why? I’m much stronger on my own than any of the little spirits you’ve gathered.” He smiled again, a hollow, superficial thing. “There’s no reason to pretend. After all, you’re going to die here, and you won’t be able to tell anyone.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Shadow Ghoul!” Mahad called, bracing himself against the pull of another drain on his _ba_. The symbol appeared on his _dia dhank_ , and the monster lunged up from the shadows under the bridge.

Claws swiped at the ghost, but passed through like the space was empty. Mahad could see, for a moment, the shape of bloody flame and smoke gray that the night-haunt really was, but it disappeared a second later as the spirit reasserted his desired face. Then the Shadow Ghoul wailed, a cutting sound of agony, and Mahad gagged on the sheer pain that was transmitted back to him. A second later the tie cut off, mercifully, as the ghost finished unweaving the monster. Shreds of violet and black drifted down and were dragged in. Bakura dropped his hand from where he’d held it up and pressed it back to Mahad’s shield.

“That was stupid,” Bakura said chidingly. Mahad had to agree. The problem was that a summoned monster was literally made up of magic. He hadn’t realized that the night-haunt was quite so…adept, or strong, or dangerous. He’d hooked his power into the creature’s manifestation and unbound it, then yanked it into himself. It was that assimilation that his Diabound had displayed, turned into a direct weapon.

 _Ah,_ Mahad realized, _that was where the weakness was_. Bakura was covering for two points of vulnerability. The first was that he was dead, and therefore could be exorcised like any spirit- if the person he was facing had both the skills and knowledge to do so. It was why he had played human at the court, mimicking donning Aknamkanon’s grave goods and acting as if he needed to summon a monster for combat when he was one himself. The second was his _ka_. Diabound had not been immune to attacks. It was certainly a very strong _ka_ , and knowing what he did now, Mahad thought it drew more than a little from the undying nature of its master, but it was the same type of creature as any _ka_ was. Destroy it, and the ghost would no longer be able to maintain his manifestation. _That_ was why he had declined to summon it here.

Well, that and the fact that he could certainly kill Mahad with his bare hands, now that he no longer had to play human. Mahad’s shield was almost eaten through, discoloration traced over nearly the whole thing. And the human body had limits on how much power it could channel- Mahad could renew the wall, but he wouldn’t be doing anything but feeding the ghost more magic and making himself more tired.

“I came here because I was willing to sacrifice myself in order to beat you,” Mahad said, not so much to the thief as to himself.

Bakura snorted. “You’ve done _so well_. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity.” He hooked bloody fingers into the gaps in the barrier. “I’ll tell you what. Since you _have_ been so obliging, I’ll just drain you dry instead of ripping you to pieces. Hand over the Ring and you won’t even feel a thing, I promise.”

Mahad thought of giving himself over to the bottomless hunger he could feel through his shield and suppressed a shudder. “I had a different death in mind. Illusion Magician!” The armored shape appeared beside him.

Bakura regarded it without fear, the barrier Mahad had raised finally evaporating as the ghost consumed the last of it. He flexed a hand, violet glimmering for a moment before the last shards of Mahad’s magic were absorbed. “An interesting form of suicide, done in by your own spirit creature.”

“Suicide, yes,” Mahad said. He reached out to Illusion Magician down the tie that bound summoner and monster and the deeper sympathy that lay between himself and his materialized _ka_. It felt like bleeding out, like letting go. He pulled every scrap of magic he could, the bonds he’d laid on the Ring, the warmth of the blood in his own veins, even the threads that bound his soul to his flesh. He funneled it all into the form of his _ka_. “But that’s not going to be what kills me,” he managed, before his vision went dark.

~

Dark Magician opened his eyes. He could feel the faint binding to the body now dying on the bridge, the strengthening pull of the tablet on the cliffs far above. Like this, Bakura was an eerie blaze of dead fire. He could see the spirit of the child underneath, the strength of a life cut brutally short; fed, untrained and unknowing, into the same spell that let Mahad become one with his own spirit shape and given a single guiding purpose.

There was still no question of who was stronger- Bakura had spent his decade as a ghost amassing power and learning how to use it, and he’d bled Mahad to the quick. But that wasn’t the point- the point was to lose the battle and win the war.

The magician said, “I feel sorry for you. But I’m not going to let it end here, and I am _not_ going to let you get what you want.” He gripped his staff, readying the power surging through his veins for the attack.

“What I _want_ is the death of all your hopes, the end of the royal line, and the blood of anyone who tries to stop me,” Bakura said, baring his teeth, bloody flame collecting in his palms as he coiled. “But I can definitely start with _breaking you first_.” The ghost lunged.

**Author's Note:**

> (Yes, Bakura's actual appearance as a ghost is that of a child. He's actively projecting an appearance that would match his chronological age if he wasn't dead.)


End file.
